Estimating the Effect of Social Influence on Subsequent Reviews

Abstract

This study proposes an effective way of using retailer-prompted review data from TripAdvisor to measure the social network effect in self-motivated online reviews by overcoming the reflection problem. After applying the network effect model, we find that self-motivated review ratings are positively associated with previous corresponding peer reviews. We further show that the size of this peer effect attenuates as the peer reviews are located further away from the first page. This study suggests that reviewer ratings are more strongly influenced by peer ratings located on the visible page.